elsewhere, aided by the Dutch. The government bestirred itself under the direction of the inevitable Monk. The London conspirators were seized, information was sent to the local authorities, who made arrests and called out the militia, and the danger was averted. Parliament met at Oxford in October and, as a sequel to the plot, passed the most ferocious of the persecuting measures, the Five Mile Act, by which no Nonconformist preacher or teacher was permitted to come within that distance of a city or borough, save on a duly certified journey.

The next year repeated the history of its predecessor. The English fleet under the only man who seemed to rise to emergencies in this dark time, Monk, met the Dutch off the North Foreland and fought there a terrible battle which lasted three days, and was claimed as a victory by both sides. Again this was followed by a calamity. In September a fire broke out in London which raged almost unchecked for a week, and laid the greater part of the city in ashes. France, meanwhile, entered the war on the side of Holland, and the English government, corrupt and exhausted, seemed almost ready to fall. It was little wonder that the sectaries, though their arms had been lost in the fire, plucked up courage and laid more plans. Six weeks after the fire the Covenanters in west Scotland, maddened by persecution, were in arms, and maintained themselves for some weeks against the forces sent against them. During the following winter the English, short of money, and negotiating for peace, resolved not to set out a fleet in the spring. In June the Dutch, apprised of the defenceless condition of the English coasts, brought together a fleet under De Ruyter, sailed up the Medway and the Thames, took Sheerness and Chatham, broke through the defenses there and captured or destroyed the English ships they found at anchor. There was little to oppose them. The Guards were drawn out, the young gentlemen about the court enlisted, the militia was brought together, and volunteers collected. Some entrenchments were dug, and guns were mounted to oppose a landing. And the Lord General Monk, who had done all that was done, marched up and down the bank, before the Dutch ships whose big black hulks lay well within the sound of his voice, chewing tobacco, swearing like a pirate, shaking his heavy cane at the enemy, and daring them to land. They did not kill him as they might easily have done. From their ships came a brisk cannonade, volleys of jeers and profanity, and the insulting cries of English seamen aboard, deriding their fellow-countrymen ashore. And with these insults the fleet presently weighed anchor and sailed away to patrol the coasts, interrupt commerce, and attack other ports. In particular an attempt was made on Landguard fort, covering Harwich. There the Dutch fleet was taken into the harbour by English pilots, some twelve hundred men landed under command of an English exile, Colonel Doleman. But despite the heroic efforts of the "tall English lieutenant-colonel" who led them, efforts which extorted the admiration of his fellow-countrymen who held the fort against him, the Dutch were driven off. At Portsmouth and elsewhere similar attempts were made but with no greater success and, the negotiations then in progress at Breda having been expedited by this exploit, the Dutch fleet withdrew, leaving England seething with impotent rage and mortification. Peace was signed at Breda a month later, on terms influenced in no small degree by this notable raid, the first in centuries which had brought an enemy into the Thames.

And what had become of our friend Blood in these stirring times? It is not to be supposed that the organizer of Irish rebellion, the correspondent of English revolutionary committee and Scotch Covenanters, and the friend of De Ruyter, sat quietly apart from this turmoil of war and conspiracy. Yet, working underground as he did, like a mole, it is possible to trace his movements only by an occasional upheaval on the surface. It seems quite certain that he did not, like so many of his countrymen, enlist in the Dutch service and that he was not among the four or five thousand troops, mostly English, which manned their fleet, nor did he, like them, take part in the attempt to storm the forts covering Harwich. On February 13, 1666, there is a secret service note, that Captain Blood may be found at Colonel Gilby Carr's in the north of Ireland, or at his wife's near Dublin, and that the fanatics had secretly held a meeting at Liverpool and put off their rising till after the engagement of the fleets. On May 3, there is a similar note concerning a man named Padshall, then prisoner in the Gatehouse in London, that if he is kept close he may discover where Allen, alias Blood, lodges, or "Joannes" alias Mene Tekel, and the note indicates their presence in the city. Then came the battle of the North Foreland and the failure of the Dutch to crush the English fleet. On August 24th we learn that these two men, Blood and Jones, have gone to Ireland to do mischief. There another plot was reported forming, which contemplated the seizure of Limerick. But this, like that of the preceding year on the Tower, both of which bear a strong family resemblance to the old design on Dublin Castle, were discovered and defeated. One insurrection alone, as we have seen, resulted from this unrest, the rising of the Scotch Covenanters in October. And among them, according to advices which came to the administration, was Blood. He had evidently found the Irish plot betrayed and with some of his companions, described in the accounts of the Pentland rising as "some Presbyterian ministers and old officers from Ireland," hurried to the only chance of real fighting. That was not great. The Covenanters, cooped up in the Pentland Hills, were beaten, dispersed and butchered, before concentrated aid could be given them. Blood, as usual, escaped. He seems first to have sought refuge in Lancashire among his relatives. Thence he went to Ireland, but, landing near Carrickfergus, was so closely pursued there by Lord Dungannon that he turned again to England, and by the first of the following April was reported to the government as being at the house of a rigid Anabaptist in Westmoreland. From there he watched the government unravel the web of conspiracy he had been so busy weaving.

Yet even here lies another mystery. In 1665, at the time when he might be supposed to have been most active against the government, his wife petitioned, through him apparently, for the return of certain property seized from her father by one Richard Clively, then in prison for killing a bailiff, and in December of that year it appears that certain men convicted of attending conventicles are to be discharged, and the order is endorsed by Blood. More than that, there is a petition of September, 1666, the month of the Fire, noted as "Blood's memorial," requesting a permit from Secretary Arlington that the "hidden persons, especially the spies, be not seized till they are disposed of." From such data it has been conjectured that Blood was playing a double part, that he was, after all, no dangerous conspirator but a mere informer.

And this brings us to a most curious phase of this whole movement, the relation of the conspirators to the government. It is a remarkable fact that no small number of those who to all appearances were most deeply implicated in conspiracy, corresponded at one time or another with the administration, in many instances furnishing information of each other to the secretaries. And this might lead, indeed, it has led, many to imagine that the whole of these vaunted conspiracies were, after all, nothing but what we should call in the language of modern crime, "plants," devised and executed by the government itself for purposes of its own. There is, in some instances, evidence of this. But in many others it is apparent that this is not a full explanation of cases like that of Blood. In that doubtful borderland between secret service and conspiracy it was often possible for a man to serve both sides. Having engineered a plot and acquired